Commentary/Vir Sanghvi

Why would anybody pay Quattrocchi? How could he have helped swing the contract?

Retired officials and generals are being hauled out of their homes and made to answer the same questions that they answered ten years ago, to the JPC, to the CBI, to the press and to nearly everybody else.

To make the whole thing sound more dramatic, the CBI has declared that it will take three months to investigate the matter. And Tiger has informed the press that his investigation is on 'the fast track' despite 'the language problem'.

Three months? Fast track? Language problem?

What is going on?

Eight years ago the JPC discovered that Bofors had paid three agents. One was a company called Svenska that we now know was controlled by Win Chadha, who was Bofors's official agent in India. A second company was called Pitco (though it changed its name later) and was probably controlled by the Hindujas (I say probably because the documents have still not been transferred by the Swiss). But there was a mysterious third agent, AE Services, who was cut into the deal just weeks before the contract was signed and whose commission came from Chadha's entitlement.

Obviously, the AE Services payment was a kickback. AE Services itself is a letter-box company with no employees and no offices of its own. It could not have performed any services for Bofors. Moreover the manner in which it suddenly entered the picture is extremely suspicious.

Tiger's documents are expected to reveal that the money from the AE Services account was transferred to another account, the ultimate beneficiary of which is Ottavio Quattrocchi.

But why would anybody pay Quattrocchi? Unlike Chadha, he was not Bofors's Indian agent. How could he have helped swing the contract?

There are no easy answers. Perhaps Quatrocchi took the money on behalf of somebody else. Perhaps he misused his closeness to the Gandhis to con Bofors into paying him off.

Either way, Quattrocchi's involvement is the key issue. As far as I know, he has never been interrogated by any investigating agency. He was allowed to leave India with indecent haste even after the press named him as the man who got the AE Services money.

The CBI should be tracking Quattrocchi down. It should be interrogating his associates. And it should try and find out what he did in return for the millions.

But of course, it is doing no such thing. It was wasting its time -- and ours -- with pointless interrogations of minor players and pathetically raking up the ground that every investigator has gone over several times before.

At this rate, justice will never be done. The Bofors issue will remain unresolved. And the Indian people will never know the truth.

But at least Tiger will have become a television star.

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